Play your QR music cards with Apple Music

When I first launched QRSong!, cards only played through Spotify. That was fine until it wasn't: a steady trickle of emails arrived from people who had bought a deck, sat down to play, and discovered the household ran on Apple Music. For a while the honest answer was a workaround involving a third-party app. It worked, but it was not something I was happy sending customers to.

That is no longer the answer. Apple Music is supported directly in the free QRSong! app now, along with Tidal, Deezer and YouTube Music. This post explains how it works, and where it is genuinely better or worse than Spotify, because the difference matters more than the marketing usually admits.

Connecting Apple Music takes about a minute

1. Install the free QRSong! app on iPhone or Android.
2. Open the settings and pick Apple Music as your service.
3. Sign in once with your own Apple Music account.
4. Scan a card with the app and the song plays.

There is nothing to re-buy and nothing to re-print. The cards you already own work as they are, and that includes decks you bought before any of this existed.

Apple Music is the best of the alternatives to Spotify

This is the part worth being precise about, because the five services do not behave identically and the difference decides whether the game actually works.

The thing that makes a guessing game a game is hidden playback: the app has to start the track without showing you what it is. On Apple Music it does exactly that, and it plays the complete song rather than a thirty second preview. Release years come straight from Apple Music, which matters more than it sounds: a timeline game lives or dies on whether the year on the back of the card is the year the song actually came out.

Spotify behaves the same way. Tidal and Deezer also hide the track, but on a thirty second preview rather than the full song, which is plenty for guessing a year. YouTube Music is the one to avoid if you can: it has no hidden playback at all, because the link has to open in the YouTube Music app where the title is on screen. It still plays your cards, but somebody has to hold the phone and look away.

So if you have a choice, Apple Music or Spotify. If you are on Tidal or Deezer, you lose nothing that matters. If YouTube Music is all you have, it works, with that caveat.

You can see all of this laid out on the supported platforms page.

Scan in the app, not with your camera

Your phone's camera will read the QR code, and it will also ruin the round. The camera shows the song title in its link preview before you even tap it, which ends the guessing before it starts. It also opens a browser first and then tries to hand off to a music app, which is slow and sometimes lands in the wrong place.

The app skips all of that. It resolves the card, sends the track to the service you connected, and keeps the title, artist and year out of sight until somebody turns the card over.

It also reads the cards you already own

The same scanner works on Hitster cards and selected other music QR cards, not just ours. If you own a retail deck and do not have Spotify, you can play it through Apple Music with the free app and never buy anything from me at all. I would rather people knew that than not, and if you want the longer version I wrote it up separately: playing your Hitster cards without Spotify.

When the deck stops being fun because everyone has learned it, that is the moment to make one from your own playlist.